How To Simulate Outdoor Runs On A Treadmill

Audio Transcript

Danny: Today’s question comes from Jeff.

Jeff: With the recent cold weather and ice in my area of the country, I’ve been doing my temple and interval workout and the treadmill. Is there a certain way to set up the treadmill, or should I be trying to do those outside? I do the rest of my workouts outside but I felt safer doing those indoors.

Danny: Great question.

First and foremost, if you plan to do most of your runs outside, and the weather is bad, and you’re unsure about your footing out there on the ice or the snow or the rain, it’s much better staying indoors on the treadmill, if you have that option.

If you do take your workouts indoors, research shows that an incline of one percent on the treadmill is pretty accurate, when it comes to reflecting the demands that you would face outside, in respect to wind resistance.

Some people like to go up to one and a half percent or two percent incline, but one percent is what research backs, and it’s pretty accurate.

Some other things that you can add to your treadmill run for workouts like temples, and intervals that you can’t necessarily get outside, would be to simulate the demands of your target race.

I mean, the obvious one is Boston. You can simulate the course on your treadmills with some rolling hills, or even put blocks underneath the back legs of your treadmill to simulate downhill running for your temples.

This just adds another stimulus and is specific to the demands of the Boston course. You can do this with any race course.

With a lot of the newer, more technologically advanced treadmills, you can upload a course and it will automatically adjust the incline/decline based on going through the realm.

Another advantage of having treadmill indoors is if you are running in colder conditions, colder weather through the winter, but your target race is in a couple of months, and it’s in warmer weather, it could have a negative effect on your race day.

A few come to mind. It would be Houston, half or full, and that’s in January.

There are people that do the Goofy or the Disney races down in Florida. If you’re training in 20s and 30s, and you go down there and race in the hot and humid 70s and 80s, that could also have a big negative effect on your race day.

So, running indoors is a great opportunity to acclimate somewhat to the heat and humidity. It also allows you to practice race day fuel and nutrition, without having to worry too much about logistics, about running a loop or how you are going to take your fuel and hydration in, every half an hour, or every four miles, or whatever your race day plan is.

Running inside can take some of the guessing game out of that in the route planning.

Some of the cons to be on the inside, outside of it being somewhat boring for a lot of people to run on treadmill, some of the cons that we have seen are, you can just set the pace for your workout and kind of zone out.

As long as you can stay on the treadmill, you know you’re on pace. But you can tone out how you’re feeling and you kind of lose that ability to develop a sense of pacing, which you’ll need on the race day.

It’s the same thing with using the Garmin.

A lot of people train and live by what their Garmin feedback is giving them, and end up neglecting what their internal cues are.

Internal cues are about how you’re feeling, your breathing rate; your perceived effort. And then you get in the race day, and something happens with your Garmin or your watch or the splits get messed up, and you have nothing to fall back on.

It’s the same thing with running most of your workouts on a treadmill. You lose that sense of effort and that sense of pacing.

A lot of things I’ve seen, working in the gym in the past, is the maintenance on gym treadmills or even at home treadmills is too far in between.

And the motors and the display become uncalibrated, and the display is reading something a lot different than what their motor is, actually turning that bell.

So, you could be running somewhere around 730 pace per mile, for instance, is what the bell is turning over at.

But the display might say 830 or 815, or the other way round, 630 or 645 pace. The effort is a lot harder or a lot easier than what it should be.

And my rule of thumb when always moving workouts to the treadmill, is to rely more heavily on effort and going into the workout, know the effort you should feel, how you should feel during a temple, during a set of different intervals, and always rely on that more so, than what the display is telling you, especially when you’re not sure that it’s correct.

That was a great question.

Again, a lot of people will go back and forth with the treadmill and running outside.

I personally like to run outside only a few days when it’s snowing or if there snow outside.

Running is meant to be outdoors and that’s what’s kind of got me into the sport, and I think that is correct for most people.

If you feel it’s safe to go outside then do so. Run outside on the roads, in the trails that are specific to the demands of your race and your workouts.

Always get in those rolling terrains and not always come back in default into the treadmill and tune out. That’s a great question.

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